OCUK Forum Server Hosting

HOkay

HOkay

HOkay

Associate
Joined
16 Nov 2010
Posts
50
Location
Chippenham
Hi all,

I've been a regular user of OCUK for a few years now but don't often venture on to the forums (although I do when there's a particular product thread I'm interested in!).
I'm looking into starting up an online community forum type of thing (nothing like OCUK so I'm not trying to steal users!!) and wondered if anyone could tell me what something like the OCUK forums are hosted on? I'm guessing it's hosted through an external company rather than in-house, but of course could be wrong there.

Any info would really help me in deciding what sort of hosting I would require to begin with.

P.S. Got my comically gaudy "passion" red Bitfenix Prodigy custom water build with an OCUK 7970 after-market water block fitted all up and running...and it's epic. Thanks again OCUK for siphoning my money from my bank account into the guise of expensive electronics!
 
Haha, I'll get on it tonight! I've been waiting for a decent camera because my S3's camera just isn't showing off the beast enough for my liking.
 
Last I heard, the forums run from a rack in a dusty old broom closet in the back of OCUK HQ, the power for which comes from a dynamo that the dons have to take turns at pedalling.. which is why sometimes the forums slow down a little..
 
You're behind the times there. They've hired hamsters as the Dons didn't really work out.

The Dons have been replaced by an AI script.

Don't ask where the real ones went.

@HOkay, I wouldn't start with anything massive as it'll take time to grow your forums. Maybe look for something that has a lot of expandability rather than paying huge amounts now for hardware that won't be fully utilised yet.
 
While I would be interest to hear what hosting they use, because i am in to that kind of thing. I don't see how it is information that is required in order for you to create a forum.

if you are knew to setting up forums you might want to try one of the forum hosts instead. They basically do all the hosting and you just have an admin panel to set up the categories and settings etc.

There is a few of them, zetaboards, invisionfree etc. google search hosted forum boards

If you want to set up a forum with a host. Then look at renting a dedicated server from one of the many hosts out there. Then install a httpd like apache with php and mysql support. Then use one of the many free forum software out there. like phpbb, mybb, vbulletin.
 
you won't need anything as big as ocuk has.. just get tsohost 4.99 plan and it'll do.. you'll hardly use any bandwidth and building up a user base that's 1% what ocuk is will be a tough job :)
 
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We use the worlds smallest server.

However this could be a lie. - If you are starting a forum, you can start small, with template and hosting packages out there, there is a huge choice. Doubt you would need something as big as ours, or not just yet. :)
 
Indeed, just get a copy of vbulletin (or a free alternative), some shared hosting and a domain name. Will do you fine for a fair few people, and once it starts becoming sluggish, you can move to a semi vps or greater.

Good luck, tis a tough world! I remember when I was 16 starting a forum, it went surprisingly well, and in retrospect I should have kept it running. But I sold it. :D
 
By the looks of it OCUK use dedicated hosting from Serverstream.
The forum is just a vBulletin install.

For starting out i would go with vidahost shared, i believe it comes with the ability to auto install many different forum software tools.
 
Lots of forum members, including myself, host sites with TSOHOST. Turns out they're owned by a forum member, but I only found that out after a few years of being a happy customer!

Serverstream is who the OcUK Store and Forums are hosted by, owned by another forum member. That's obviously a much larger scale (my biggest sites push 100GB/month, dread to think what OcUK uses!) and has had to deal with DDOS's etc in the past. Look back and you'll probably find threads with people moaning about the site slowing down to a crawl, which is true, but that could well be code/database issues rather than the server hosting itself.
 
When I used to host TrackMania servers I had a forum alongside that just hosted on a pretty basic VPS - with several thousand registered users (not inculding spam accounts) and about 16 active users concurrently on average, peak 30 and a lot of months didn't even exceed 1-2GB a month. Unless your hosting something with 100s of active users for the most part you won't need to worry too much about the hosting hardware/bandwidth.
 
Rroff said:
When I used to host TrackMania servers I had a forum alongside that just hosted on a pretty basic VPS - with several thousand registered users (not inculding spam accounts) and about 16 active users concurrently on average, peak 30 and a lot of months didn't even exceed 1-2GB a month. Unless your hosting something with 100s of active users for the most part you won't need to worry too much about the hosting hardware/bandwidth.
Click to expand...

my site has 5k+ users with 20-80 active at once and tops out at around ~140 during busy periods, we host a tone of images, files etc on our hosts and only come close to 100gb.. 90-95gb average
 
File and image uploading on a busy forum can eat quite a lot of traffic - had one image in a popular thread that was responsible for ~5GB of traffic a month for a couple of months all on its own.
 
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